Rich, Radiant Slaughter Read online

  The analysis also made sense because of the person who was running the project: Evelyn Nesbitt Kleig, a junior publicist at Austin, Stoddard and Trapp, and a one-woman walking encyclopedia of fads, fashions, fanaticisms and foo-politics. I’d known Evelyn for three or four years—she’d been publicist on my first true-crime book (the one about the Agenworth murder, which won the Charlotte Brontë Award), and again on my most recent, Blood Red Romance—and on one level I didn’t understand her at all. She was a young woman, no more than twenty-eight or twenty-nine. She talked like one. She dressed like one. She just didn’t act like one. Where most of her contemporaries spent their weekends at singles bars or networking parties, Evelyn spent hers working for charities. I come from one of those very old New England families where volunteer service is a kind of sacrament. My mother is the mainstay of the Connecticut branches of everything from the American Cancer Society to the Friends of the Metropolitan Opera. Even with all that in my background, I found Evelyn stupefying. It wasn’t so much the charities she chose—although there had been something called the Gay and Lesbian Vegetarian Action Army Task Force for the Struggle for Social Justice in a New Age—as the sheer number of them. “Educational efforts” to alert the public to the dangers inherent in allowing municipal governments to erect nativity scenes in public parks, fund drives to provide free condoms to the habitués of shooting galleries, organizations formed to Bring the Truth about Nuclear War to the inmates of daycare centers—if it needed money and promised to be totally ineffectual, Evelyn was right in the middle of it. She even crossed the great divide between political obsessions. She worked as hard for the Center For Educational Choice—which was a group advocating the teaching of Genesis in high school biology classes—as she did for the Institute for Secular Ecology. The Institute for Secular Ecology was trying to get all mention of God removed from the Declaration of Independence.

  What Evelyn didn’t do was have boyfriends, go on dates or waste her time at merely social gatherings. In all the years I had known her, I had never once heard her mention a single person, male or female, unconnected to her by paid or volunteer work. As far as I could tell, Evelyn Nesbitt Kleig didn’t have a private life. She might not even know what one was.

  There was something else she didn’t do, and that was where my original analysis of the National Book Drive as a Bob Geldof rip-off fell down. Most of the imitators who have taken the Band Aid concept and run with it have been interested as much in their own personal glory as in any good they might do. Evelyn was definitely not interested in that. She had a thousand chances to promote herself. The reporters who had come to greet us in every city we visited would have been more than happy to have a story on the woman behind the scenes. Evelyn wasn’t having any. She herded us around like a sheep dog at shearing season. She made sure we got to the right places at the right times. She melted into the woodwork. After four weeks and nine cities, I was almost ready to admit her motives were entirely pure.

  Almost, but not quite.

  I stood at the door to the waiting room, under the hand-lettered cloth banner, and stared into the cavernous space inside while giving Phoebe a chance to catch up. A long table covered with a series of thin white cloths had been set up in the middle of the wooden benches, with microphones strewn across the top and gray metal folding chairs shoved into a row at the back. In front of this table were the assembled representatives of the Baltimore local media, plus a camera crew from CBS News. In back of it, Christopher Brand and Tempesta Stewart were fighting for the right to the center space. Evelyn was off to the side, her Cyndi Lauper-look-alike outfit hidden under a heavy winter coat. With her was our benefactor and chief underwriter, Jonathon Hancock Lowry, the one the press always called a “billionaire recluse.” That wasn’t entirely accurate. He wasn’t really a billionaire—the fortune he’d inherited had topped out at eight hundred fifty million. He wasn’t really a recluse either. He was just a twenty-two-year-old boy with too little meat on his bones and too much Adam’s apple—who’d been kept as sealed off from the real world as any fragile fledgling of an endangered species, until the day he turned eighteen and was handed both his freedom and the country’s largest hereditary fortune in a single stroke. Jon Lowry was almost terminally shy. He’d been taught by tutors at home instead of being sent to school. He’d been forbidden the company of other children for fear he’d catch “germs.” He’d been as completely cut off from the world as his crazy Aunt Gertrude had been able to get him, which was very cut off indeed. When he’d expressed an interest in going to Disneyland, she’d had a complete mini-amusement park—Ferris wheel, roller coaster, and carousel—built on the grounds of the two-hundred-acre Lowry estate.

  Now Jon Lowry was out in the world, and he literally didn’t know what to do there. He’d wandered into an open meeting for the Housing Project, attached himself to Evelyn and refused to let go. Either Evelyn had convinced him of the very same thing she’d convinced herself—meaning that the stars of the tour were the authors, and nobody else should interfere—or she’d failed to convince him to perform for the cameras for the sake of charity. Neither proposition made much sense. Best-selling authors like Phoebe and Tempesta and Christopher Brand would bring in a lot of people to buy books, but the appearance of a famous “billionaire recluse” would bring in even more. Hell, he’d bring in people who had never bought a book. And although he was shy, he was more than merely “attached” to Evelyn. I’d had the distinct impression throughout the tour that if Evelyn had asked him to carry her piggyback from New Orleans to Minneapolis, he’d have done it.

  I heard footsteps behind me and turned around. Phoebe was staggering to the waiting-room door, looking almost as green as she had when I’d left her back at the train. I turned away—if she wasn’t going to tell me, I wasn’t going to ask her—and gestured at the scene inside.

  “Look at that,” I said, meaning Tempesta and Christopher. “The Guru of Sexual Indulgence and the High Priestess of Premarital Virginity. Who do you think will win?”

  “Amelia,” Phoebe said.

  “Amelia isn’t there.”

  “Look.”

  I looked. There was a churning in the crowd at the back. A moment later, Amelia Samson, the eighty-two-year-old Queen of American category romance, pushed her way through to the table. A split second after that, she was firmly and irretrievably ensconced in the center chair. The mainstream press likes to paint romance writers as pink, fluffy little things, with dithering brains and vague smiles and a passionate desire to please. Amelia Samson was five-ten and weighed two-forty. She had spent her twenties running a mangle in a steam laundry, in the days before all that was automated. The muscular development of her shoulders and upper arms was awesome. She looked like a linebacker—or would have, if she hadn’t been wearing a beaded Worth traveling suit just as well-armored and well-constructed as she was herself. Christopher Brand worked out with weights two hours a day seven days a week. Amelia could have crumpled him up like a piece of paper.

  “And at her age, too,” I said. “Good old Amelia.”

  “Look at Hazel,” Phoebe said. “She looks ready to bust a gut.”

  Hazel did indeed look ready to bust a gut. She was a traditional romance writer, as “traditional” had been defined since the Great Romance Boom of 1980. She didn’t like Christopher Brand because he was a “literary” writer, one of the breed who always seemed to be working overtime to make people like Hazel and the work they did seem totally worthless. She didn’t like Tempesta Stewart because Tempesta—as Hazel had put it at the meeting that had elected Tempesta to the executive board of the AWR in spite of Hazel’s efforts—represented a “step backward.” Did we really want to go back to the days when romance novels ended at the closing of the bedroom door? Of course we didn’t.

  Phoebe tugged at the sleeve of my sweater. “Who’s that?” she said. “Over there on the left. They’re not press. They look official.”

  I followed the direction of her pointing fin
ger. “Oh,” I said. “The blonde is Gail Larson. She owns The Butler Did It.”

  “The Butler Did It?”

  “The Butler Did It is the store we’re supposed to sign at tonight. Are you sure you’re all right? You never forget—”

  “Who’s the other one?”

  The other one was a woman on the far end of her fifties, with one of those smooth gray helmets of hair that always look as though they might really be hats. She had on a blue gabardine suit and a little pinched pout—as if she did a lot of things she thought she wasn’t properly appreciated for. I made a face. I’d never seen her before, but I could guess who she was. There had been someone like her in every city on the tour. For some reason, all enterprises concerned with books attract a fair percentage of the sort of people who get their kicks making sure nobody has any fun. They bludgeon their way into positions of power in the fan organizations. They attend open book parties in droves. They make life hell for everybody within screaming distance—and you have to be nice to them. The pleasant people are all so used to the inexpungible presence of these idiots, they’ve practically stopped volunteering to do any of the work that needs volunteers to get done.

  I couldn’t remember the name, so I rummaged around in my pockets until I found the crumpled sheet of paper with my Baltimore schedule on it. The only possibility leaped at me without my having to do any work at all.

  “Try Mrs. Harold P. Keeley,” I said.

  “Mrs. Harold P. Keeley? Do people do that anymore? I mean, call themselves Mrs. John instead of Mary Smith.”

  “Some people do,” I said. “Anyway, she’s the only person on the list I wouldn’t recognize. She’s supposed to be the head of the Baltimore Book Lovers Association.”

  “Oh dear,” Phoebe said.

  “Do you ever wonder why things work out this way?” I said. “You can’t do anything anymore without having it taken over by a lot of self-righteous fanatics. Self-righteous fanatics of the Left. Self-righteous fanatics of the Right. Self-righteous fanatics with no excuse at all except that they like being self-righteous fanatics. It’s driving me crazy.”

  “Here comes Evelyn,” Phoebe said. “She looks frantic. Do you ever wonder about that? Evelyn always looks frantic.”

  I did a one-hundred-eighty-degree turn and saw Evelyn bearing down on us, as frantic as Phoebe had said she was. When Evelyn got frantic—and Phoebe was right, it happened often—even her hair seemed to be electrified.

  She skidded to a stop in front of us, her coat flapping open to reveal a Day-Glo orange miniskirt constructed in tiers.

  “Patience!” she said. “Phoebe! You can’t stand here all day. We have to get started.”

  “I don’t think they need us to get started,” I said. “Amelia’s giving them a lecture.”

  Evelyn’s head twisted around on her neck, far enough and fast enough to make me think (inevitably) of the little girl in The Exorcist. Then it started to swivel back, and stopped in mid-slide. She stared at Gail Larson and the woman I thought must be Mrs. Harold P. Keeley and frowned.

  “Damn,” she said.

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “What?” she said. She faced us again, biting her lip. “Sorry. There’s just so much to do. Writers simply do not realize—”

  “—how hard it is to run a book tour. I know all that, Evelyn. Phoebe and I—”

  “Oh, Phoebe and you are all right. You’re not crazy, at least. Unlike some people I could mention.”

  “Like Tempesta Stewart?” Phoebe asked, hopeful. Phoebe had made her reputation on the hottest sex scenes in the business. She didn’t like Tempesta any more than Hazel did.

  But Evelyn waved Tempesta away. “She’s all right,” she said, “as long as you don’t let her do anything drastic. There was an incident in Nashville once with an abortion clinic. The one who drives me crazy is Christopher Brand. The arrogant little son of a bitch.” She turned her head again, but not quite in the right direction. She was talking about Christopher Brand. She seemed to be looking at Jon Lowry. I wondered idly if there was something wrong with her eyes, or something on her mind we ought to know about.

  She swiveled around again—it was like watching one of those jellyroll toys you can buy in Appalachian Crafts Shops—and said, “You know why we’ve spent half this tour in mystery bookstores? Because of Christopher Brand, that’s why. Practically nobody else would have him. They have had him. He’s got the worst reputation in the history of book tours.”

  “He hasn’t been bad on this one,” I said. “I’ve hardly seen him.”

  “He hides in his closet and drinks,” Evelyn snorted. “And then—well, never mind. Everything’s worked out so far and we don’t have that much to do in Baltimore. But even the chain stores won’t have him, and he’s such a big name he sells five hundred books anyplace he appears. He’s just too much damn trouble. And they think he’s dangerous. And they’re right.”

  “Dangerous how?” Phoebe perked up a little.

  “He stabbed a bookstore clerk in Tacoma. It was only with a penknife, but still. Are you two going to come over and sit down? There goes the poster now.”

  The poster was a traveling announcement of who and what we were. The what came first, with a row of pictures underneath it. Under mine it said: PATIENCE CAMPBELL MCKENNA, NEW YORK TIMES BEST-SELLING AUTHOR OF BLOOD RED ROMANCE.

  Blood Red Romance had made the Times list for exactly a week. So had my book on the Agenworth murder. The book that came between those two—an exposition of the deaths of several members of the Brookfield publishing family—had sunk out of sight without a trace.

  I hooked the straps of my tote bag over my shoulder and took Phoebe by the arm.

  “Into the fray once again,” I said.

  Phoebe shook her head. “No, no,” she said. “I’m afraid I’ve got to—”

  She shook my hand off and disappeared into the gathering crowd, her face as green as the velvet of her caftan.

  I stuck a cigarette in my mouth and promised myself—swore to myself—that when this tour was over, I was going to sit that woman down and give her a talking to. I was going to give it to her in exactly the tone of voice my mother would have, and I wasn’t going to shut up until she started making sense.

  In the meantime, I had Christopher Brand, Tempesta Stewart, Amelia Samson, and CBS News. It was really too bad Evelyn didn’t want to make personal capital out of this. The spadework she’d done must have been first-class.

  I gave brief and not very serious thought to following Phoebe—just in case she had been poisoned—and headed for the press table.

  Chapter Three

  It was one of those situations that start out crazy and go positively lunatic in no time at all—and if I’d seen it coming, I’d have done what I should have done, right from the beginning. What I should have done was demand an explanation, if not then and there (CBS had been joined by ABC), then at least as soon as we got back to the hotel. Instead, I let myself be carried—first through the press conference (“Could you tell me, Miss McKenna, how it feels to make your living off of other people’s pain?”); then through the cab ride out to the harbor (“If somebody doesn’t do something about that little snot, I’m going to stick a pin in him”—Hazel Ganz on Christopher Brand); then up to the reception desk at the Sheraton Inner Harbor. By the time we got to the reception desk, all I could think of was that the Sheraton Inner Harbor, unlike most of the other hotels we’d stayed in for the tour, actually looked nice. It had a high-ceilinged, open-plan lobby with pretty carpets and furniture more domestic than industrial. It had a little Christmas tree in a planter, decorated with red and silver bulbs and tiny twinkling white lights. I’d heard rumors it had some of the best room service on earth.

  The woman at the reception desk handed me a little white card and a ballpoint pen. I handed her my American Express card. Behind me, Christopher Brand lit up his pipe and silenced the chorus of staff objections before they started. There are a few advantages to having a
reputation for physical violence.

  He tapped me on the shoulder and said, “I don’t get you. You don’t want to screw, and I’m beginning to think you actually like those people.”

  “I don’t want to screw you,” I said. The Sheraton Inner Harbor might have some of the world’s best room service, but like every other hotel in the world, it had a registration card that defied analysis by anyone who was self-employed, independently wealthy, or just plain out of work. I struggled with questions about work addresses and home phone numbers with my right hand and held up my left for Christopher’s inspection. It was something I’d done two or three times in every city we’d visited, as if if I did it often enough, Christopher Brand would get the point. Nick is the epitome of a self-made man, which means that although he’s doing very well, he doesn’t like to spend money. He’d made an exception for my engagement ring, possibly because his mother (who thinks I’m wonderful) insisted on it. I had a mammoth pear-shaped diamond surrounded by tiny little sapphires. The quality was so good, that ring could have lit up a room with no electrical help.

  It could not, however, get Christopher Brand’s attention. He turned his back to the reception desk and looked down the line at our company. “You do actually like these people,” he said. “You’re an intelligent woman. Can’t you tell they’re idiots?”

  “Idiots how?”

  “Idiots,” Christopher Brand said. “They’ve got IQs the size of golf scores.”